I am very, very sorry for making such a n00b thread. I'm sure you guys are totally fed up with giving advices to all these people asking for help, but I must insist.

I've been invited to join a Shadowrun 4 group, and they needed a Magic user, so I took up the role. The thing is, I'm having terrible issues trying to decide skills and gear (and cyberware) for my character... there's just too many stuff to choose and I'm afraid I might leave something behind or not use the character to the fullest.

I had 3 types of character in mind, if it's even possible to make something like this. Either a:
- Magical intruder, specialized in stealth both in the physical and magical world, or
- a "summoner", whose specialization is fighting with spirits, or
- a pure Healer, focused in healing, protection and buffs.

I'm sorry if I'm being a pretentious biatch and I hope you people can give me some direction on how to make the best out of my character, for my own and my group's sake.

Thanks a lot for any input!

Well, #1: god forbid you fail to be fully optimized.

Taking 1 Essence (and therefore 1 Magic) worth of Cyber/Bio can be worth it, but isn't necessary. Classic choices include cybereyes (which work for spellcasting, but Astral Perception is usually sufficient), Pain Editor/Trauma Damper (anti-drain; don't forget that Restricted Gear is required for items above Avail 12), or a cyberfoot (Capacity for nanohive, misc. widgets).

A common 'trick' is Restricted Gear for a strong Power Focus, and many people like Mentor Spirits (IIRC, you must take one at chargen, if ever).

Stealth might cost you too much of your resources in skills, attributes, and gear, but it's certainly doable and fun. There is very little stealth in the magical world, unless you're a Pixie, but summoning Concealment spirits can help.

Spirits are very powerful and versatile, and you barely have to specialize in it.

For a healer, you'll want to *also* use mundane First Aid, with Logic and the overpowered Medkit.

I'm not going to go into huge detail, but one thing that wasn't mentioned in the plethora of choices was a Mentor Spirit.

Just off the top of my noggin in regards to the Heavy Healer would be the obvious choice of Bear, but there was also the Great Mother in Street Magic. GM has a penalty against Combat Spells, though.

Any particular reason, beyond the apparent appeal of min-maxing, of wanting to get cybered as well?

Good luck, and have fun.

The only thing stopping you from doing all of those is the "pure" bit of being a healer. Just take a combination of stealth and healing spells and solid Summoning/Binding skills with specialisation on your favourite spirit type.

And a power focus 4 is indeed a steal at 100k¥ / 4 BP + Restricted Gear 5 BP. Augmentation can come ingame, it is a rewarding fast path of improving a mage. Just start with a magic of 5, and deal with it dropping to 4 later.

This is a bad role for a mage. Hiding in astral is impossible until you get masking. Getting a few points in the stealth group is mandatory for any character.

This is a good tactic if you end up feeling you have too few points to spend on everything. It's certainly not something you normally need to specialise in.
That... ummm.... is rather an under-defining role for a mage. Mages in SR4 are easily very powerful, and relegating yourself to the sidelines like this isn't necessary.

What I suggest is: Be a generalist mage.

Be a race with some darkvision, i.e. dwarf or orc. Mages have problems with technical darkvision unless using cybereyes, so this is important. Spending a spell on it, which you even need to sustain, is rather a waste.

Take fetish casting for those spells with heavy drain.

Get a sustaining focus of at least force 3, and cast Increase Reflexes into it, with edge, so that you can get 4 IPs.

A Force 4 power focus at chargen is cheesetastic, of course. While it may be fairly cheap in points (20BP for resources, 4BP to bind, 5BP for quality = 29BP), it does not help for all skills of the magical skill groups. Hence, you can't just leave the groups at low ranks. Also, you will not be able to take Focused Concentration 2, or even just buy cyber or bioware to aid with drain, because cash is actually fairly limited.

I've been playing around to make a mage or two, and one thing I noticed is you are going to have a hard time trading skills and attributes. Every build I've looked is maxed at attributes, and very light on skills. 200 on attributes, plus another 70 on edge and magic, you've used a big chuck of BPs. I usually end up very light on postive qualities, astral cameleon and mentor spirit. Some advice, from what I've noticed, pick spell casting or summoning to start and get really good at them. It's cheaper to build one up from scratch, than to take both from halfway to good. Personally, I've started thinking that summoning gives you a more well rounded character to start, since you can summon a different spirit based on need, where as with spell casting, you are limited to to your spells.

Right now I'm looking at Conjuring Group 4, Assessing 4, Counterspell 4, and Spell Casting (Manipulation) 2 with deflection, influence, bind and compel truth. You summon a spirit for combat on your behalf, and then use counterspell, deflection, or bind throughout the rest of combat. Additionally, you have compel truth and influence for non-combat situations, giving you something decent to do. If you go with a Charisma + Willpower tradition, you can even have some face-like skills, but will probably not have enough points to be a full-on, specialized face.

For a foci, I was leaning towards binding, since its pretty cheap, and its an easy way to get extra services once you bind the spirit.

Bah the medkit just covers the threshold of 2 to actually heal someone with first aid.

I'd think about whether or not you want to be an elf. If elf go a charisma tradition, if not elf go logic or the rare and I don't like it intuition tradition. I actually have before modded the occult detective and been happy with the results. It isn't a powerhouse but I found it useful.

Anyways stats for a mage, could go something like this. This is assuming BP instead of Karma builds.
Human
Body 4
Agility 2
Reaction 3
Strength 2
Charisma 3
Intuition 3
Logic 5
Willpower 5
Essence 6
Magic 5
Edge 3

240 BP

Skills
Conjuring 3
Spellcasting 5
Ritual Casting 1
Counterspelling 4
Etiquette 2
Infiltration 4
First Aid 5

114 BP

4 Spells including heal = 12 BP
Power Cocus level 4 24 BP

Take 35 points in Disads.
15 magician
5 restricted gear(power Focus)
Mentor Spirit or astral chameleon

20 pts in contacts and other gear ans maybe a skill or 2.

Stupidly easier to pull off with karma except the power focus.

Nice You guys are the best, lol.
The only reason why I want sort of a min/maxed character is because our GM is a redeemed roll player, but still has a knack for giving us a tough time during combat or anything that might give us an advantage and he hadn't predicted, so yeah... the best performance ever is pretty much required.

The Mage I created is sort of a mess I guess... lol. Human hermetic mage, with the Fire-Bringer mentor spirit (thus focusing on manipulation spells and summoning fire spirits) and mostly manipulation spells in the arsenal. The idea was to have the spirit fight in my place while I'd be supporting my team with crowd control (like Control Emotions or something like that) or providing cover or blocking paths with Physical Barrier, while setting people on fire with Ignite.

The skills I set for my guy is the Conjuring skill group, Spellcasting and Counterspelling. I also added some Pistol (focused in semi-automatics), Con (focused in Impersonation, the idea was to have some bonus when decieving people through the use of Physical Mask) and First Aid.

When I told my GM that my intention was to mostly use spirits, he immediately went to look at the Banishing section of the manual, lol. Anyways, I guess there's really no point in trying to specialize in anything and I guess I'll go the generalist rule, maybe just print out the character Shinobi Killfist created.

Thanks a lot everyone for your support and keep the ideas coming if you want. =)

Spirits are a cool way to handle things. The main issue I have with them is they are not great if you need something done now!!!

Your first action assuming you have a spirit on call is to command the spirit. That is Combat turn 1 for many mages since they might not have additional passes out of the box. The spirit needs to spend an action to materialze, then he finally gets to start acting on his own. If you were ambushed and needed to dive for cover that first pass it takes even longer to get things going. Meanwhile a force 9 stunball would have wiped out much of the opposition in the first pass. Now if you are starting the fight spirits work out well because the ramp up time is happening off screen.

While I can rarely afford it out of the gates improved reflexes and a sustaining focus is a great thing to get for a mage. Also if you go logic tradition you can keep more focuses active at one time(its equal to your logic, like the number of spirits is tied to your charisma) If you don't use that, you basically lose one of the only reasons to be a logic tradition.

By the way in my build the first 2 karma I'd get is to specialize first aid into "combat wounds" or if I was selfish maybe specialize it to "magically actives" As is he is rolling 16 dice with a medkit level 6, so on average healing 3 boxes of damage. Add in a heal with 14 dice and you heal another 4 boxes, so you'd get someone from 7 boxes(jacked up) to perfect health in a couple minutes.

Remember, you can have spirits on standby in astral plane to beckon when needed. Not great for surprises, but if you know to expect trouble, you can have one ready to go.

I decided I'll just borrow Shinobi's build and work on that. I still like the idea of being attuned to Fire, so I picked the Mentor Spirit quality and Fire-Bringer again. That gives me +2 to Manipulation spells, +2 when summoning Fire Spirits and -1 to Illusion.

Now, which spells would you recommend learning, besides the obvious Heal? His build comes with 5 spells, heal included.
What about the Foci? The build gives me a Power Focus rank 4, and then what? A couple rank 3 sustaining Foci? What would you recommend?

As always, thanks a lot for any info.